Last September, some of the Debian Linux distribution's leadership wanted to make sure that Etch, the next version of Debian, arrived on its December 4th due date. Almost two months later, though, according to the February 17th Release Critical Bug Report memo to the Debian Developers Announcement list, there are still 541 release critical bugs.

Another way to look at Debian is to look at is at the reference implementation of an abstract system - the Debian System. As a reference implementation, it doesn't focus on all the shiny niceties we have all gotten used to - but it works. Sun does this with their J2EE product, they release reference implementations.

People like Ubuntu, Linspire, Mepis produce friendlier implementations of the abstrace Debian System. This does not in any way detract from Debian, it is rather a testament to its usefulness.

Having said that, I find Debian to be a very usable system if you know what you are doing. If you don't, it is best to use one of the friendlier implementations.

What exactly happens at the moment? There are "nice" distributions that used to be based on Debian - well, they are now based on Ubuntu. So this "reference implementation" thing is somewhat fading away ...

Debian _is_ a very usable system. What I mean is: Does it still attract new users? Isn't it true that Ubuntu takes away a huge chunk - even now with Dapper for servers? And isn't Ubuntu on its way to substitute Debian (tho somewhat impossible since it's based on Debian itself)?

Well, if Ubuntu ever stops being based on Debian, then I would agree that Debian has a problem. However, I don't see that happening in the near future. The fact that Linspire and Mepis are _indirectly_ based on Debian is to me a moot point. They are still implementations of the Debian System.

It's hard to say anything definite of the usage stats of non-commercial distros. Nevertheless, it looks like most of Ubuntu's users come from somewhere else, not from Debian. It's also possible that some Ubuntu users want to check out the "mother-distro" once they've played around with Ubuntu for some time. And Debian has a solid (and well-earned) reputation as a very reliable server distro.

>People like Ubuntu, Linspire, Mepis produce friendlier >implementations of the abstrace Debian System. This does >not in any way detract from Debian, it is rather a >testament to its usefulness.

True, but none of them makes use of the enormous work of stabizing the codebase as none of them is based on stable. Most of that work goes to waste as serious users have to seek for updated versions of their target software voiding any testing and integrations effort debian developers did.
Maybe debian should just ditch stable alltogether.